Jennicam by Jennifer Ringley
At my first tutorial, Rachel Falconer suggested that postphenomenology would be a useful framework for me to investigate participatory internet art. This week, I reviewed “A Field Guide to Postphenomenology” by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The postphenomenological framework fits my project because I’m investigating the relations between humans and interactive online art, a specific technological artifact.
Postphenenomological studies “investigate how, in the relations that arise around a technology, a specific “world” is constituted, as well as a specific “subject” (31). Here, we can understand the subject as a person interacting with an online game, which forms part of the constituted world.
Rosenberger and Verbeek extensively cite Don Ihde, who outlines four basic forms of technological mediation. The ones I find most relevant to participatory internet art are embodiment relations and alterity relations.
The authors write that “when a technology is ‘embodied,’ a user’s experience is reshaped through the device, with the device itself in some ways taken into the user’s bodily awareness” (14). They cite how cell phones “[transform] a user’s capacity to communicate with others over a distance” (38). As I discussed earlier with digital witnessing, online games can open up new topologies of viewing and communicating, particularly in their technologies of livestreaming and chat. I always find the experience of viewing a livestream uncanny: like my vision has been augmented, like I’m partially in a different place, like I’m seeing something I shouldn’t be able to see.
Ihde relates embodiment to transparency, “the degree to which a device (or an aspect of that device) fades into the background of a user’s awareness as it is used” (14). The notion of transparency is interesting for online artworks – they often present a novel way of interacting with technology, foregrounding it. Certainly, the more a viewer interacts with the artwork (which online games permit by allowing long-term and persistent play), the more the technology can be sedimented (“the force of habit associated with a given human-technology relation” (25)). But In my experience, the technology never recedes into the background, because the unique interaction design is often the point of the artwork.
Rosenberger and Verbeek also discuss alterity relations, where “sometimes we encounter a device as itself a presence with which we must interrelate” (18). This adapts the phenomenological concept of other, the “special experience of engaging with another human being” (18).
I noticed that other people were absent from the postphenomenological analysis. The relation is always between I, the technology, and the world. In participatory art, humans interact with other humans through technology. A person is at once a subject and an object to other people. Online interactive artworks definitely present others in new, surprising ways. I’m curious as to whether there are postphenomenological texts that incorporate multiple subjects and the relations between them.
References
Rosenberger, Robert and Peter-Paul Verbeek, editors. Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015.